Facebook — still the biggest social network — was sign up-gated for 2.5 years.
and 3 years after its launch people still thought that Myspace is invincible
Related from Brian Balfour https://brianbalfour.com/essays/how-to-launch-a-product-or-feature-to-maximize-growth
related: early days of IG, founders hosted dinners with creators to onboard them Onboarding is a design space
With all the recent news about institutional adoption of DeFi (JPM, Fidelity):
btw afair IG was iPhone-only for some time and users protested when they added the Android version as they wanted to keep it exclusive
@perl nice find, even platforms that weren't gated and became popular would've only had 1-5% (aiming high) of their users in the first 3 years
you couldn't sign up to FB without an email address of a US university. we Euros had to use Myspace ;)